Faculty issues in higher education, 1970-2000

Faculty Fairness in Compensation, Gender, & Field of Study (1970-2000)

The American university has never been -- and will likely never be -- a perfect or perfectible society, according to Dr. Holborn Grey, an authority on the university and college communities (Holborn, 2010). But on the subject of evenhandedness vis-a-vis faculty resources, when the period in question (1970-2000) is carefully reviewed, there are instances of unfairness in compensation, in gender, and in salaries for faculty in varying fields of study.

While the media has focused on student issues -- a worthy field of study -- between 1970 and 2000, there has been a dearth of attention paid to the difficulties / challenges experienced by faculty on university campuses. These discrepancies need to be pointed out and rectified.

Unfairness in Compensation for Certain Faculty Members

In the book Faculty Productivity: Facts, Fictions and Issues, the author references a 1987 book by Burton Clark in which Clark asserts that since education (and higher education in particular) represents the hope of the human race, faculty should not be agitating for more pay. Why not? Because, Clark insists, the rewards that come from knowing that a professor is contributing to the better good of society should outweigh the need for a decent salary (Tierney, 1999). In addition to that rationale, the U.S. Department of Education proclaimed (in the late 1980s) that faculty members in research universities were either satisfied or very satisfied with their paychecks.

That having been pointed out, Tierney reports that between 1995-96, full professors in engineering earned an average of $20,000 more than did full professors in education; and faculty teaching courses in management were given raises that helped them gain 2% per year over inflation, but faculty teaching foreign languages and literature just barely kept pace with inflation.

Gender Unfairness in University Faculty Compensation Policies

While the number of women faculty members has increased -- especially since the late 1970s -- the compensation awarded to female faculty members has not kept up with compensation awarded to male faculty members (Tierney, 1999). One potential rationale for this gap in compensation fairness is that there are relatively few women in the higher paying fields of learning (computer science, business and engineering), and hence, women tend to be teaching languages and social sciences (Tierney, 1999).

Meanwhile at the University of Louisville, in the early 1970s, female faculty members pointed to major salary differences between male and female instructors (Cox, 2000). In response, the university did increase the salaries of some females in the faculty. However, a 1994 Task Force on the Status of Women reported that many female faculty members were discriminated against vis-a-vis salary and other compensation at the university. In the spring of 1997, a $1.1 million investment was made in women's compensation to make salaries more equitable (Cox, 2000).

Universities and Corporate America -- Hanna Holborn Gray

In the drive to raise money -- not necessarily to improve faculty compensation, but rather to enhance universities' branding and prestige -- universities have become commercialized and linked to corporations (Gray, 2010). Marriages between corporations and universities is considered suspect and tainted, and is a misuse of higher education, Gray points out. University bureaucracies that emphasize fundraising and linkage to corporate America, Gray continues, is a contemptible trend in education. When university administrators become in effect CEOs, passionate only about the bottom line, the high ideals of education are lost in the shuffle, and faculty members suffer when their universities become commercialized pawns of corporations, Gray asserts in her lecture.